Now a major motion picture streaming on Hulu, starring Anne Hathaway and Thomasin McKenzie
Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize
“Eileen is a remarkable piece of writing, always dark and surprising, sometimes ugly and occasionally hilarious. Its first-person narrator is one of the strangest, most messed-up, most pathetic—and yet, in her own inimitable way, endearing—misfits I’ve encountered in fiction. Trust me, you have never read anything remotely like Eileen.” —Washington Post
So here we are. My name was Eileen Dunlop. Now you know me. I was twenty-four years old then, and had a job that paid fifty-seven dollars a week as a kind of secretary at a private juvenile correctional facility for teenage boys. I think of it now as what it really was for all intents and purposes—a prison for boys. I will call it Moorehead. Delvin Moorehead was a terrible landlord I had years later, and so to use his name for such a place feels appropriate. In a week, I would run away from home and never go back.
This is the story of how I disappeared.
The Christmas season offers little cheer for Eileen Dunlop, an unassuming yet disturbed young woman trapped between her role as her alcoholic father’s caretaker in a home whose squalor is the talk of the neighborhood and a day job as a secretary at the boys’ prison, filled with its own quotidian horrors. Consumed by resentment and self-loathing, Eileen tempers her dreary days with perverse fantasies and dreams of escaping to the big city. In the meantime, she fills her nights and weekends with shoplifting, stalking a buff prison guard named Randy, and cleaning up her increasingly deranged father’s messes. When the bright, beautiful, and cheery Rebecca Saint John arrives on the scene as the new counselor at Moorehead, Eileen is enchanted and proves unable to resist what appears at first to be a miraculously budding friendship. In a Hitchcockian twist, her affection for Rebecca ultimately pulls her into complicity in a crime that surpasses her wildest imaginings.
Played out against the snowy landscape of coastal New England in the days leading up to Christmas, young Eileen’s story is told from the gimlet-eyed perspective of the now much older narrator. Creepy, mesmerizing, and sublimely funny, in the tradition of Shirley Jackson and early Vladimir Nabokov, this powerful debut novel enthralls and shocks, and introduces one of the most original new voices in contemporary literature. Ottessa Moshfegh is also the author of My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Homesick for Another World: Stories, and McGlue.
I picked Eileen as one of the books that looked intriguing on this year's Book long list. Mostly, I was drawn to the cover and to the premise of a dark mystery set in 1960s Boston.
Sadly, the book didn't deliver. Instead of the mystery, I got a story of misery and self-loathing. To be fair, this could have been intriguing as the book tried to focus on a character study of the main character, Eileen, who's life is made miserable by her having to care for her alcoholic father. There is mental abuse and despair. The situation is not helped by her working in a private prison for adolescent boys. So, in a way Eileen spends her time in three prisons - the one she works in, the one she lives in physically, and the one she lives in mentally. I thought this was such a promising setup. However, as the story dragged on - even a character study needs some plot - I just wanted the book to end because it really wasn't going anywhere.
By the time I was ready to give up, we finally, FINALLY, had a plot twist. Unfortunately, it was a little too late and too outrageous to fit in with the preceding story. Seriously, it was such a rushed turn of events that I was not just underwhelmed but it made me wonder whether this afterthought had been suggested by an editor after the first draft had been delivered....Not impressed, and I have no idea how this ended up on the long list.
I have since picking this up read some reviews which try to compare Eileen to a Patricia Highsmith novel. I can see how someone would want to draw the comparison. It is flattering, but a Highsmith novel this is not. Maybe Mossfegh's next novel - if she decides to write another one of the same ilk - will be, but Eileen lacked the atmosphere and the suspense to come anywhere close to justifying that comparison with one of the great writers of dark and twisted mystery thrillers.
